Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It's a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time. Deep work will make you better at what you do and provide the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftsmanship. In short, deep work is like a superpower in our increasingly competitive 21st-century economy.

Mindwise: How We Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want

You are a mind reader, born with an extraordinary ability to understand what others think, feel, believe, want, and know. It's a sixth sense you use every day, in every personal and professional relationship you have. At its best, this ability allows you to achieve the most important goal in almost any life: connecting, deeply and intimately and honestly, to other human beings. At its worst, it is a source of misunderstanding and unnecessary conflict, leading to damaged relationships and broken dreams. How good are you at knowing the minds of others?

The War of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle

Internationally best-selling author of Last of the Amazons, Gates of Fire and Tides of War, Steven Pressfield delivers a guide to inspire and support those who struggle to express their creativity. Pressfield believes that “resistance” is the greatest enemy, and he offers many unique and helpful ways to overcome it.

Stumbling on Happiness

A smart and funny book by a prominent Harvard psychologist, which uses groundbreaking research and (often hilarious) anecdotes to show us why we're so lousy at predicting what will make us happy, and what we can do about it.

Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur

When anyone can start a business (when everyone is running their career like a business), it begs a question. This is your one chance at life, you can have anything you want, what is worth doing? Most people don't know why they're doing what they're doing. They imitate others, go with the flow, and follow paths without making their own. They spend decades in pursuit of something that someone convinced them they should want, without realizing that it won't make them happy. Anything You Want is a manifesto about living life, appreciating enough, and doing what matters.

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

For decades we've been told that positive thinking is the key to a happy, rich life. "F*ck positivity," Mark Manson says. "Let's be honest, shit is f*cked, and we have to live with it." In his wildly popular Internet blog, Manson doesn't sugarcoat or equivocate. He tells it like it is - a dose of raw, refreshing, honest truth that is sorely lacking today. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck is his antidote to the coddling, let's-all-feel-good mind-set that has infected modern society and spoiled a generation, rewarding them with gold medals just for showing up.

Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise

Have you ever wanted to learn a language or pick up an instrument, only to become too daunted by the task at hand? Expert performance guru Anders Ericsson has made a career of studying chess champions, violin virtuosos, star athletes, and memory mavens. Peak condenses three decades of original research to introduce an incredibly powerful approach to learning that is fundamentally different from the way people traditionally think about acquiring a skill.

Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

After a stint policing the rough streets of Kansas City, Missouri, Chris Voss joined the FBI, where his career as a hostage negotiator brought him face-to-face with a range of criminals, including bank robbers and terrorists. Reaching the pinnacle of his profession, he became the FBI's lead international kidnapping negotiator. Never Split the Difference takes you inside the world of high-stakes negotiations and into Voss' head.

Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries

What do Apple CEO Steve Jobs, comedian Chris Rock, prize-winning architect Frank Gehry, the story developers at Pixar films, and the Army Chief of Strategic Plans all have in common? Best-selling author Peter Sims found that all of them have achieved breakthrough results by methodically taking small, experimental steps in order to discover and develop new ideas.

What Would Machiavelli Do?: The Ends Justify the Meanness

The focus of What Would Machiavelli Do? is on what works and how to get it done. Machiavellians may not get to heaven, but on earth they have a significant edge over the competition. The goal is to learn how to approach problems in a manner that is at once creative, geared toward achieving financial success, and refreshingly amoral.

Ego Is the Enemy

"While the history books are filled with tales of obsessive visionary geniuses who remade the world in their images with sheer, almost irrational force, I've found that history is also made by individuals who fought their egos at every turn, who eschewed the spotlight, and who put their higher goals above their desire for recognition." (From the prologue)

Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart: 30 True Things You Need to Know Now

Full of things we may know but have not articulated to ourselves, Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart is a gentle and generous alternative to the trial-and-error learning that makes wisdom such an expensive commodity. For everyone who feels a sense of urgency that the clock ticks and still we aren't the person we'd like to be, it offers solace, guidance, and hope.

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

David Allen reads an all-new edition of his popular self-help classic for managing work-life balance in the 21st century - now updated for the new challenges facing individuals and organizations in today's rapidly changing world. Since it was first published more than 15 years ago, David Allen's Getting Things Done has become one of the most influential business books of its era and the ultimate book on personal organization.

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions

All our lives are constrained by limited space and time, limits that give rise to a particular set of problems. What should we do, or leave undone, in a day or a lifetime? How much messiness should we accept? What balance of new activities and familiar favorites is the most fulfilling? These may seem like uniquely human quandaries, but they are not: computers, too, face the same constraints, so computer scientists have been grappling with their version of such problems for decades.

The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living

Why have history's greatest minds - from George Washington to Frederick the Great to Ralph Waldo Emerson along with today's top performers, from Super Bowl-winning football coaches to CEOs and celebrities - embraced the wisdom of the ancient Stoics? Because they realize that the most valuable wisdom is timeless and that philosophy is for living a better life, not a classroom exercise. The Daily Stoic offers a daily devotional of Stoic insights and exercises, featuring all-new translations.

Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

In this must-listen book for anyone striving to succeed, pioneering psychologist Angela Duckworth shows parents, educators, students, and businesspeople - both seasoned and new - that the secret to outstanding achievement is not talent but a focused persistence called "grit". Why do some people succeed and others fail? Sharing new insights from her landmark research on grit, MacArthur "genius" Angela Duckworth explains why talent is hardly a guarantor of success.

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

What sparks the flash of brilliance? How does groundbreaking innovation happen? Answering in his infectious, culturally omnivorous style, using his fluency in fields from neurobiology to popular culture, Johnson provides the complete, exciting, and encouraging story of how we generate the ideas that push our careers, our lives, our society, and our culture forward.

The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph

We are stuck, stymied, frustrated. But it needn't be this way. There is a formula for success that's been followed by the icons of history - from John D. Rockefeller to Amelia Earhart to Ulysses S. Grant to Steve Jobs - a formula that let them turn obstacles into opportunities. Faced with impossible situations, they found the astounding triumphs we all seek.

The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right

We live in a world of great and increasing complexity, where even the most expert professionals struggle to master the tasks they face. Longer training, ever more advanced technologies - neither seems to prevent grievous errors. But in a hopeful turn, acclaimed surgeon and writer Atul Gawande finds a remedy in the humblest and simplest of techniques: the checklist.

A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

One of the great fears many of us face is that despite all our effort and striving, we will discover at the end that we have wasted our life. In A Guide to the Good Life, William B. Irvine plumbs the wisdom of Stoic philosophy, one of the most popular and successful schools of thought in ancient Rome, and shows how its insight and advice are still remarkably applicable to modern lives. In A Guide to the Good Life, Irvine offers a refreshing presentation of Stoicism, showing how this ancient philosophy can still direct us toward a better life.

Rework

With its straightforward language and easy-is-better approach, Rework is the perfect playbook for anyone who's ever dreamed of doing it on their own. Hardcore entrepreneurs, small-business owners, people stuck in day jobs who want to get out, and artists who don't want to starve anymore will all find valuable inspiration and guidance in these pages. It's time to rework work.

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won't create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren't learning from them. It's easier to copy a model than to make something new: doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1.

The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance

The Art of Learning takes listeners through Waitzkin's unique journey to excellence. He explains in clear detail how a well-thought-out, principled approach to learning is what separates success from failure. Waitzkin believes that achievement, even at the championship level, is a function of a lifestyle that fuels a creative, resilient growth process.

The Mathematics of Love

In this must-have for anyone who wants to better understand their love life, a mathematician pulls back the curtain and reveals the hidden patterns—from dating sites to divorce, sex to marriage—behind the rituals of love. The roller coaster of romance is hard to quantify; defining how lovers might feel from a set of simple equations is impossible. But that doesn’t mean that mathematics isn’t a crucial tool for understanding love. Love, like most things in life, is full of patterns. And mathematics is ultimately the study of patterns—from predicting the weather to the fluctuations of the stock market, the movement of planets or the growth of cities. These patterns twist and turn and warp and evolve just as the rituals of love do.

Publisher's Summary

In this eye-opening account, Cal Newport debunks the long-held belief that "follow your passion" is good advice.

Not only is the cliché flawed - pre-existing passions are rare and have little to do with how most people end up loving their work - but it can also be dangerous, leading to anxiety and chronic job hopping.

After making his case against passion, Newport sets out on a quest to discover the reality of how people end up loving what they do. Spending time with organic farmers, venture capitalists, screenwriters, freelance computer programmers, and others who admitted to deriving great satisfaction from their work, Newport uncovers the strategies they used and the pitfalls they avoided in developing their compelling careers.

Matching your job to a preexisting passion does not matter, he reveals. Passion comes after you put in the hard work to become excellent at something valuable, not before.

In other words, what you do for a living is much less important than how you do it.

With a title taken from the comedian Steve Martin, who once said his advice for aspiring entertainers was to "be so good they can't ignore you", Cal Newport's clearly written manifesto is mandatory listening for anyone fretting about what to do with their life, or frustrated by their current job situation and eager to find a fresh new way to take control of their livelihood. He provides an evidence-based blueprint for creating work you love.

So Good They Can't Ignore You will change the way we think about our careers, happiness, and the crafting of a remarkable life.

What other book might you compare So Good They Can't Ignore You to and why?

Some of Peter Drucker's works on knowledge workers and second act careers.

Any additional comments?

Cal Newport's work is an important contribution to career-planning books. Unlike the reviewer who recommends not to buy the book if you are over 30, I would heartily recommend it for those new to the world of work as well as those who have many years under their belt. Cal's advice on mission plan and good use of career capital can be put to good use by someone who has been in the knowledge working world for a while. If there is a shortcoming, it might be that Cal's perspective is at times narrowed by his academic career. Some of his advice could use refining or evolution for those of us in business. But it is a very good start and, hopefully, not his last contribution to this important area.

I do take note of fellow reviewers' input to make buy decisions. But something made me override their advice this time.

I've now listened twice, beginning to end. And certain parts three or four times in quick succession. It will be more in the future. I've decided on this re-listening strategy to get the muck out of my mind, planted by passion preachers. I, however, take full responsibility for following that message.

Cal reminded me of my success method of the past. A method I did not name, or put the required weight on, or thought about, it was just done - deliberately. But it sadly was forgotten, droned out by passion evangelists.

Thank you for writing this book. It helped me GREATLY!

Narration never bothers me. I always have a little chuckle when reading reviews on narrators. I'm just glad someone exerted the effort, saving me the time. The background to that statement: I used to buy computer voices to read text for me. Obviously that was before I discovered Audible.

I bought this book despite having read the review cautioning about it if you're over age 30 (Im 40). The book's premise was so compelling that I had to judge it for myself. This book suggests a solution, based on a shift in perspective, to the challenge of finding what path is right for you. Its a discussion between chasing your dreams and what I'll call "working" your dreams. Its a wonderful contrast that attempts to answer the question whether chasing passion or whether dedication to improvement is responsible for career success and fulfillment. This discussion is applicable whether you're just starting out searching for answers or find yourself later in life wanting more out of your choices. Its apparent that a tremendous amount of research, along with examples, had been done by the author and used to articulate his theory, which I appreciated. The premise of this book can be debated endlessly, but for me it was outstanding. The knowledge gained from this book will serve me well. Thanks Cal.

This is exactly the book I needed to listen to. I've felt stuck for more than 10 years because I've been searching for my "calling" or my "life's work", and I've not invested myself into what I WAS doing with my life because I was waiting to discover the passion that lived inside of me before I chose a path in life.

This book explained that I was doing it all wrong and what to do instead. I now realize that diving fully into what I'm doing and becoming really good at it is what will lead to feeling passionate about my career... not waiting for some innate secret wellspring of inspiration to be discovered and then I'll finally "take off". This book really saved me from another 10 years of wasting my life. Highly recommended!

The audiobook was performed really well. I listen to mine at double speed using the Audible app, but I kept having to pause it because the lessons in this book were so incredible that I had to write them down for later. I enjoyed listening to it, and I intend to make this one of the books I listen to every year.

This audio delivers on its title. He argues against following your passion to find the ideal job and instead believes that passion comes after you already become excellent at something. Very easy to follow and I like how he ties ideas from many other contemporary authors into his work. I was surprised by how young the author is. Highly recommended for anyone who is planning their career.A few good summaries of the audio.

I often listen to books in the business/ career genre, and have long been troubled by the fact that I really had no idea how to change the downtime activities I enjoyed into my career. I really don't know how to transition from video games and reading sci-fi/fantasy fiction into a sustainable career, and I wasn't sure if I even wanted to try. This book made me realize that maybe I don't have to.

I felt as though the book was a little slow getting into it, but in the end I am glad that I listened to the full book. I really enjoyed that each point he made was tied to a real person interviewed by the author, it made it easier to implement the information in the book. The book's conclusion, in which the author describes the application of his findings in his own life, gave me a lot of ideas about how to improve my own work.

If you have been told by someone that you won't be happy at work unless you "find your passion" and have been discouraged by such mantras, you will enjoy this book. And you won't continue to feel like an un-passionate weirdo in this passion-oriented culture.

I took a chance buying this since it is a new book with few reviews. It is a refreshing break from the "passion" based literature that is popular now. It teaches what has become uncommon sense these days - you get out of life what you put into it. Its backed by some research and good anecdotes, and gives needed perspective if you start thinking that you have to "find your calling". Few people find it without investing time, effort, an open mind, and patience, first. Saying that, I still find lots of motivating and helpful ideas in the passion based approach, so its not all black and white to me, but still this book adds a refreshing perspective.

While it was refreshing to hear someone saying "follow your passion is too general", the 20 something author lacks life experience to back his claims. This book may be good for someone in high school or college, but if you plan to take charge of your life and choose rebirth in a new chosen field, do not get this book. It's a total let down. He tells you stories of successful people who worked at perfecting themselves since they were teenagers in their chosen line of work. He fails to do the same with the "failures". He mentions a woman who lost everything because she opened up a yoga studio. The woman ventured into a brand new path. Everyone is terrible when they first try something. After years of practice, of course, you become better. He failed to follow her for years and then document her subsequent success or failure. There are many people who reinvented themselves and became great in their chosen path. For example: Julia Child, Martha Stuart, Harrison Ford, Andrea Bocelli, etc.. This author still needs many years of practice and I must say that this book was a big disappointment. This is my summary of this book: read Malcolm Gladwell & Derek Sivers (since a lot of his research comes from them) & start something (anything) when you are a teenager, stick to it, and you will grow to love it. Everything else = failure. Also, take a shot for every time he says" in order words" and whatever you do, don't lose your career collateral!!!!!

I would put in fewer stories! The author tries to follow the Malcolm Gladwell approach of presenting research then a real life example of that research in action, but the implementation of this technique is done poorly and too often.

What was the most interesting aspect of this story? The least interesting?

I loved what Mallow had to say about Steve Martin in this book and I wish he would have dug deeper into that aspect.

Any additional comments?

I found the premise wonderful, become so good at what you do that you stand out, but a lot of the practical advise was really depressing and uninspiring.

hands down the best career advice book I've read the last 8years. if your like me, educated but totally confused abt your next step;afraid of missing out on life and are tired of finding your career passion, this is the book. i swear it has made me work harder and less depressed abt my job. mr.newport; thank you for shearing this with us.

6 of 6 people found this review helpful

Mr. T. Kerwin

London UK

4/13/13

Overall

"A real must-read"

This is hands-down the best book I've ever read about how to develop your talents and find/create work you love. I only wish I'd come across this earlier in my life!

There's so much in here that it's difficult to summarise. The best thing you could do right now is to stop reading reviews and just buy it. Seriously.

2 of 2 people found this review helpful

Ioannis

2/25/16

Overall

Performance

Story

"Best "life advice" book I've come across so far"

Unlike most "self-help" type books, this one doesn't keep hammering home the same point that could have been summarized in one chapter. The points are valid and the examples feel real!

2 of 2 people found this review helpful

Melviba

Fleet, United Kingdom

4/3/13

Overall

"Such a simple but brilliant lesson."

Ideal for those seeking passion, direction or just a boost. Really enjoyable read with some fascinating theories.

3 of 4 people found this review helpful

C4NH4M

ENGLAND

10/16/16

Overall

Performance

Story

"a masterpiece!"

Having listened to Deep Work by the same author I was very happy learning about the stories and ideas set out in this audio book.

Call Newport is awesome!

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

mp

9/9/16

Overall

Performance

Story

"A phenomenal piece of art."

This book has change my view and perception about a passion and it's role in our lives. Thanks this excellent book I learnt to think and act differently. A huge thank you to the author. A life changing material.

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

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